Thursday, October 30, 2008

A friend pointed out this site to me. It shows how much longer we have until all IPv4 addresses have been used up. I wanted to add it to my blog, so I made an installer so that others may add it to their blog, too. Look in the right-hand margin for the result.

...lighting, the way you move the camera (don't zoom in, be steady, use tripods), film grain, the exposure of the film, and of course depth of field. your depth of field isn't that great on most mini-dv cameras... they're pretty much flat. forums.studentfilms.com

White balance to off-white colors for nice tints.

Lock the camera down on a tripod and zoom in from a distance, this gives a nice shallow depth of field with blurry backgrounds much the way a film is shot. forums.studentfilms.com

Something I've learned is to get rid of shadow grain. this means toying with the exposure.

You know when yuor filming someone under a light, but everything else is dark, and the camera tries to compensate by adding more light? turn your exposure on the camera down a tad and it will get rid of that. forums.studentfilms.com

Another thing to do that is pretty easy is to add a black matte to the top and bottom of the screen. Just two bars of black. I know it's cheesy but it works well when you have no other capabilities such as knocking down the frame rate. forums.studentfilms.com

...get a camera with manual focus, exposure, and shutter speed, and set the shutter to 1/60s or slower. Use a tripod.

Film cameras normally sample time 24 times a second at 1/48th second each.

Film also tends to record a greater contrast ratio.

...film gamma tends to be more curved (exponential) than video.

Film grain tends to look more multicolored, smaller sized (because film has a greater resolution), ...

...start with basic 3-point lighting.

Use high or low angle shots to convey a character's power in a scene (camera at eyelevel is neutral).

...keep the aperture as open as possible (lower number) and the shutter speed as long a possible (normally 1/60th sec). ... Also, try and work with the camera more zoomed in (but never digitally zoomed in!) and physically farther away from the subject. This flattens the frame and narrows the depth of field (creating a blurry background)–this look is associated with being more cinematic.

Examine something as simple as the color of the walls: In a Hollywood movie, are interior walls ever off-white? No, they are either bright white or a darker, moodier color. This is a micro budget problem because most houses have off-white walls. Off-white works in real life, but looks dirty in a movie.

For whatever reason, video cameras don’t record the dark areas as black as they should (a contrast problem). ... make the blacks blacker ... by reducing the lows or with a filter called “Levels” by increasing the black input.

Blur the Highlights... The very bright areas of the frame are blurry and almost bleed into the areas directly surrounding them. ... Add a small Gaussian blur ...

Add Grain... Generate some noise that is colored and randomly changing (under it’s settings). ... Reduce opacity and experiment with composite mode (multiply might be good for this). Keep the opacity low—a little goes a long way.